Counterterrorism is a field in which seriousness is the coin of the realm, and Jessica Stern is as serious as a heart attack. The author of two prominent and prescient tomes on terrorists and their motivations (The Ultimate Terrorists and Terror in the Name of God), Stern served on the National Security Council in the Clinton administration and is variously affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Hoover Institution, and several Harvard graduate programs. Until now, Stern's work has epitomized the kind of objective, technically informed policy wonkery that buzzes quietly and responsibly along behind our oblivious distractedness. Until now.

Here is Stern in her new book, Denial: A Memoir of Terror (Ecco), imagining a certain interview that she wishes she could have at a Friendly's restaurant: "If I make him see that I am not just his object, but also a subject, there will be an explosion in his brain.... Also, his penis will fall off. I will leave him there, his brain on his plate.... [T]he top of his head will have flopped neatly off and there will be wires sticking out.... I will avoid stepping on his shriveled penis as I walk out the door. I will leave it there for the rats."

Whoa. "In my writing, I tried to stay in a kind of altered state," Stern says in an interview about describing the wildly improbable horror that in some strange way pointed her toward her vocation: One evening in 1973 in Concord, Massachusetts, while 15-year-old Jessica and her little sister were doing homework unattended, a stranger entered the house, put on a woolen mask after they saw his face, and spent an hour making them undress and play dress-up, asking them "where the knives were kept," and raping them at gunpoint.

"I was writing another book on terrorism and fear," Stern says. "I had added a vignette about what it feels like to be terrorized, and my unofficial editor, Jason Epstein, said, `Throw out the book and write about this vignette.' " Where that led is to this intensely personal, directly emotional account of Stern's formative years in a world that reads like a Grimm fairy tale as told by David Lynch. Stern's mother died of cancer when the author was three, having been irradiated all through her young life with X-rays for various vague maladies by her creepy father, a crackpot doctor. Jessica's own father, on a business trip in Norway with his third wife, chose not to rush back to Boston when he heard that his two daughters had been raped. A Holocaust survivor and an engineer who ostentatiously chose to drive Volkswagens because he refused to care who built "the best car for the money," he to this day feels compelled to admonish Stern not to stay stuck in the past.

That kind of stubborn psychic denial is something Stern herself faced in writing this stunningly brave book. "Shame is a very embarrassing thing to feel," she says. "All the emotions I felt were not very becoming. They were unpleasant, and I did not want to have them. So I had to keep peeling my defenses away in order to get down there." But Stern, the ultimate good-girl compensator, wants us to look beyond the true-crime account of her attacker—who is thought to have raped some 44 girls in the Boston area in the early 1970s. (He hung himself some years ago.) Her starting point is "What happened to the boy who became my rapist?" What she learns about his tumultuous adolescence and sad life points repeatedly and suggestively toward the pedophile-priest scandal that rocked the area a decade ago. This intuition leads her to write, "I realize that for me, rape didn't seem like sex. It seemed like a discharge of shame, an exchange of pain."

I ask her how all this might relate to her work, in which she has written about humiliation as a motivation for terrorism. I also ask whether this kind of "discharge of shame" might illuminate broader phenomena such as our slow-burn response to 9/11: the invasion of Iraq—a country unrelated to that attack's perpetrators or ideology—and Vice President Dick Cheney's renowned passage to the pro-torture "dark side."

"I'm so glad I made you think of those things," Stern says chirpily. "I didn't want to say them."